It is easy, almost tempting, to write a man like a hero when the story deals with a crime against a woman. Hindi cinema has trained us to expect it. The man must avenge. He must roar. He must reclaim “izzat”. The woman’s violation becomes his wound. Her trauma becomes his battlefield. Not in Assi, though.
Anubhav Sinha does something far more unsettling. He writes a husband who does not perform masculinity but absorbs it. And then dismantles it.
Played by Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Vinay is not interested in being a saviour. He is not interested in being seen. His first instinct is not revenge, not confrontation, not wounded pride. It is presence. He holds his wife when she collapses. He watches her drift into silence. He sits beside her in court, walks with her, not ahead of her, not dragging her along – just beside her as she tries to understand what her life now means.
No dramatic speeches or chest-beating, Vinay doesn’t shift the focus to himself. That restraint is rare in Bollywood.
Think of how often Hindi films have turned sexual assault into a man’s revenge saga. The rage in Ghajini, the violent retribution arc in Kabir Singh, where male anger becomes the story. Even in films like Pink (also starring Taapsee Pannu) and Damini, which centre on women, the courtroom ultimately needs a towering male figure to deliver the final blow. The pattern is familiar: a woman suffers, a man redeems.
Assi refuses that grammar and changes it, in fact.
Here, the husband is not protecting the “ghar ki izzat.” He is protecting space – for his wife to grieve, to rage, to fall apart. And space to fight her own battle.
Vinay is traumatised too. He is cracked open by what has happened. “What if?” “Why us?” – the questions haunt him. But the film does not let his pain overshadow hers. His grief exists, but it does not hijack.
There is only one moment when Sinha allows his anger to surface: when Vinay speaks to his family and stops them from making this about reputation, about whispers, society. He refuses to let them turn his wife into a symbol of shame.
He visits her in the hospital. He sees her bruised body, her trying – and failing to see the world the way she once did. He does not preach hope or drag her toward light. He does not make promises he cannot keep. He just stays.
Bollywood has rarely given us men who do not centre themselves on a woman’s suffering. We have seen them challenge the perpetrators, threaten violence, spiral into self-destruction, even prefer death over “dishonour.” But how many times have we seen a husband who understands that this is not about his ego? That masculinity does not collapse in the absence of loudness?
Sinha writes a man who resists ownership. A man who does not equate love with control and who understands that support does not require melodrama.
What if this is what strength looks like? Because honestly, it does. What if standing beside is harder than standing in front? Because it is. What if healing begins not with revenge, but with quiet accountability? Because it does.
Assi makes the husband a part of the solution. Justice could be delayed, or could never come, but there’s a man who will always be here – irrespective of the world’s outcome of his wife’s ordeal. In a film industry that keeps glorifying machismo and celebrates it, a Vinay is revolutionary.
Assi also features Taapsee Pannu, Kani Kusruti, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Naseeruddin Shah, Revathi and Supriya Pathak, among others.
